Tag Archives: whiteness

Sometimes an Afronaut’s going to have to land in strange territory. Sometime’s exploring a different world can teach you more about your own. And sometimes it aids colonialism. Ahem. Anthropology. So for awhile I’m going to be exploring whiteness.

There’s a number of words for people I’ve had a tumultous relationship with, the obvious racial slurs come to mind, but one I’ve always been confused by is the word wigger. I never understood why the word, and the people represented bothered me– I just knew wiggers pissed me off.

And I haven’t thought about wiggers in a long time– nowadays I have to deal with yuppies and hipsters and hippies, but back home you couldn’t walk down the stret without bumping into a wigger at every corner. But I hated wiggers for a lot of reasons.

Well thanks to Ice Cube I’ve been thinking about whiteness (I undertook a personal project to force myself to study the show Black.White) more than usual. And while watching Black.White I realized that Bruno’s view of Black Folks is what I shall temporarily refer to as wigger-logic.

See wiggers try to be black, ignoring the fact that Black isn’t something you can become, and Blackness isn’t a monolithic performance. But what has always has pissed me off is they way this racist logic has been taken as a compliment. Why does a white kid want to be a wigger? And when people say someone is sayin g they are a wigger, its really saying they want to be a nigger. So why in their racial imagination is Black equated with sex, drugs, and (in essence) rock and roll, and why is this ignored? If Fox News said half the shit that a white kid in Tims and a jersey said we’d all be pissed.

(Ignore the sloppiness of this post– I’m tired and this is verbal vomit).

Why is the fact that wigger-logic is complimentary force us to ignore that its racist, essentializing, and offensive. I’m not sure about that right now.

Well now I’m not going to use the term wigger (or chigger, or any other related terms) like this ever again. I mean nowadays I hate the word because it works on the same racial logic as the term white trash.

The NYT had a piece about literacy and internet speak today. Included was a typical family: if you’re a white upper class family from Old Greenwich, Connecticut.

At the same time the NYT ran a piece detailing how yet again “whites” are going to be the minority of this country by 2042. White fears, I’m tellin’ ya. The piece about 2042 also hinted at making “white Hispanics”, White. Seems a bit odd to me to even hint at it, we know (unless there is a radical paradigm shift) that who is considered White, will expand.

I spent the weekend in an all POC space. It was fucking fabulous. I’m a huge proponent of POC spaces. This was a physical space where we all got to speak about our issues– no one said anything about how these were smaller issues, or that class comes first. It was fucking fantastic. A number of white dudes came in during the gathering, and someone would go up, and ask them to leave if they didn’t identify as a POC.

And here at Vassar we have the ALANA Center. Which is a space for stuents of color– though all are welcome. See I’ve learned you don’t know how much of a ask you put on for Whiteness, until you relax in a POC space (besides your family, because often there’s little mask wearing there).

Also this weekend I found that POC spaces are harder to maintain virtually. My post on Vegans of Color got invaded by some white dude with a god complex. This motherfucker chose the wrong weekend to invade. I just spent a weekend hanging out with Anti-authoritarian people of color– I’m taking shit in my spaces; I was empowered. This dude doesn’t come looking to debate– he comes looking to educate. I point out his privilege, though not coddling him, because I’m tired of softening what I say to make White folks feel more comfortable, an this dude gets upset that I pointed out his privilege: his tone gets more paternalistic, and now I’m mad– how dare he invade this space, and demand that I engage him on his terms. So I leave the discussion, and tell him I won’t engage in this particular discussion again with him. That ain’t good enough for him. He says he’d like to give me the job of educating him. THE NERVE of that motherfucker. Educate your own goddamn self. What the fuck?

And then I begin wondering if White folks think this blog is aimed at them, at educating them. Because I don’t write for White folks when I write at VoC– I write for folks of color, because I want it to be a space for people of color to speak.

Toronto is debating opening an Afrocentric school. There is a lot of opposition. Who would have guessed. From what I have seen there are cries of segregation. This of course ignores both the inherent differences between segregation and seperation (one is where students are forced, and the other is where there is a choice), and that any student can go to the Afrocentric school. The other cries are Canadian taxpayers that don’t want to have to pay for Afrocentric education for anyone.

I truthfully wouldn’t want my tax dollars paying for the fucked up Eurocentric education system where I live. I think that this is a continuation of white being seen as a default, unraced objectivity. When I went through 12 years of primary and secondary education and learned for maybe 4 weeks on average a year about people of color/the Global South/anything not European or North American in general I doubt I received a balanced view of the world. And truthfully at this point, where I have control of my education I sort of refuse to take any courses dealing with European or American history unless I know the focus is on people of color. But back to my point.

I truly hope that Toronto doesn’t step down on this Afrocentric school idea. I also hope that black people in Toronto think a bit before they fuck something up that could be good for their children– who wouldn’t care more about school if they are learning about themselves?